According to a new report, the Greenland Ice Sheet lost one trillion tons of water due to melt during the four-year period from 2011 through 2014. That’s about double the typical rate of loss during the 1990s through mid-2000s. Subsequently, Greenland’s contribution to sea-level rise also doubled. As a result, Greenland alone contributed 0.75 mm of sea-level rise every year during the 2011 to 2014 period.

(The above video briefly explains the findings of a new scientific study indicating a doubling in the rate of Greenland melt during 2011 through 2014.)

Bear in mind, the study focuses on Greenland only. Those numbers don’t include thermal expansion from the world’s warming oceans. Nor do they include an increasing amount of melt from Antarctica. Nor do they include large volumes of melt coming from the world’s rapidly disappearing mountain glaciers. Together, all of these in total are pushing sea levels higher by around 4 mm per year during the 2011 through 2016 period. That’s about 1 mm more per year than the 1993 to 2009 period. But the greater additional contribution appears to be coming from melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica.

The new Greenland Study found that melt averaged around 250 billion tons per year over the four-year period. This included a single melt year, 2012, in which Greenland contributed about half a trillion tons of melt water. The massive 2012 melt was spurred by high Greenland surface temperatures during summer which resulted in spiking surface melt rates during June, July, and August. At the time, a powerful high pressure system focused heat across the ice sheet which caused most of the surface area of Greenland’s glaciers to experience melt.

During 2011–2014, Greenland mass loss averaged 269 ± 51 Gt/yr. Atmospherically driven losses were widespread, with surface melt variability driving large fluctuations in the annual mass deficit. Terminus regions of five dynamically thinning glaciers, which constitute less than 1% of Greenland’s area, contributed more than 12% of the net ice loss. This high-resolution record demonstrates that mass deficits extending over small spatial and temporal scales have made a relatively large contribution to recent ice sheet imbalance.

In other words, melt at the margins of the ice sheet and large surface melt pulses during brief periods were the primary contributors to increasing melt rated during the study period.

(Annual mass losses from Greenland and Antarctica are accelerating. This results in increasing rates of global sea level rise. While mass loss in Antarctica has recently primarily been driven by basal melt, surface melt has been the chief contributor to Greenland mass loss. In addition, the highly variable nature of surface mass loss along with its tendency to create brief, intense melt pulses is some cause for concern. Image source: Charting Ice Sheet Contributions to Global Sea Level Rise.)

The study found that surface melt rates were highly variable and dependent upon weather — with a strongly negative North Atlantic Oscillation contributing to conditions that enhanced melt during 2012. In this case, it appears that natural variability is beginning to be pushed by human-forced warming into a phase where certain years will preferentially further enhance Greenland melt. To this point, the tendency for large surface melt spikes was found to have increased during recent years. In contrast to Antarctica, where warming oceans contact glacial cliff faces and ice shelf undersides to accelerate melt, in Greenland, surface melt appears to currently be playing a bigger role in driving melt acceleration.

Surface melt can produce odd and unstable patterns of melt ponding and runoff over large ice sheets like Greenland. And as Greenland continues to warm due to human-forced climate change, an increasing risk of glacial outburst floods can be the result. The highly variable nature of surface melt is also a concern. In other words, overall warming can produce extreme, if brief, periods of warmth over Greenland that produce disproportionately large melt spikes. In this case, 2012 should not be seen as an outlier, but as the first of many future strong surface melt years — ones that will almost certainly surpass that year in melt intensity unless human-forced warming is somehow brought to a halt.

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In the 12 months up to July 14, 2016, 48 earthquakes with a magnitude of 4 or higher on the Richter scale hit the map area of the image below, mostly at a depth of 10 km (6.214 miles).

As temperatures keep rising and as melting of glaciers keeps taking away weight from the surface of Greenland, isostatic rebound can increasingly trigger earthquakes around Greenland, and in particular on the faultline that crosses the Arctic Ocean.

Isostatic rebound stress on geological systems and loss of ice sheet pressure on volcanoes does appear to be an added risk. We’ve covered it somewhat here. The mainstream science is still a bit leery on the subject.

I’ve heard similar reports of sinking from California and Mexico over the past few years. No doubt there are others I can’t recall.

I lived on the Loma Prieta segment of the San Andreas Fault several years ago. My first earthquake (and the only one I experienced while living there) was a small one, but there was plenty of evidence of other times that weren’t so lucky. Over the years, cars and shacks and things had fallen into the ravine behind where our homes stood. Hiking those hills was an eerie reminder of our impermanence on a dynamic planet. Big Creek Lumber wanted to log the redwoods in our watershed. Can you imagine the implications? The residents successfully shut it down. Rebecca Moore of Google Earth fame was on the project. She’s doing interesting work now discovering methane leaks.

The evidence for methane release after those small earthquakes looked pretty weak to me. The poor quality of the satellite methane data is a constant source of irritation – that data has so much noise in it, the Arctic News conclusion is suspect, in my opinion.

The earth.nullschool images of Siberia data looks really good, though, and are likely quite close to the true values. The data comes from GEOS-5, a NASA computer model that integrates satellite data and then synthesizes it into a coherent whole.

Siberia has had hundreds of wildfires big enough to show up as carbon monoxide hot spots on earth.nullschool this year. Somebody who knows how and has the screen capture software should make a video of this and put it on YouTube, I think. The earth.nullschool carbon monoxide images are a really good way to spot big wildfires and the data looks to be relatively unaffected by cloud cover. The earth.nullschool url can be manually edited to easily go back in time, by the way, without repeatedly hitting the back button.

climatehawk1

Thanks for yet another great article, Robert! Your pace is so fast lately that it´s hard to keep up… and I´m only reading! I can´t imagine how much work it is to research, write and moderate all this, thank you very much for doing it!

If that big melt spike before was in 2012… was it related with the big melt of artic sea ice in 2012? And should we expect a similar big spike this year, which is going so similar to 2012 in terms of loss of northern ice?

Syd Bridges

Relating to your last post on the Siberian fires, if the smoke is over Scandinavia, it may well be on its way to Greenland, helping to create more dark snow and aiding more melt. It won’t be long before the GIS alone will be producing as much SLR as we used to see from all sources. Also the other sources are increasing their contributions too. Beachfront property anyone?

redskylite

Robert, I would also like to thank you for all the climate related information and work output at a impressive pace. JMA global temperature anomaly statistics issued shows June 2016 #1 warmest, followed by 2015 and then 2014.

Although we are told not to read to much in monthly statistics, it is indeed very troubling and certainly not totally surprising or unexpected.

Still waiting for NASA GISS June statistics, I speculate they may hold yet another unwanted and grim surprise. NASA has scheduled a conference for today and will release the figures just before.

“Climate experts from NASA will discuss recent trends in global temperatures and Arctic sea ice, as well as research now underway to better understand their impacts, during a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Tuesday, July 19.

NASA scientists track global temperature and sea ice data as part of the agency’s mission to better understand our changing planet. The agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York will release its analysis of June global surface temperatures prior to this teleconference.”

Hope the politicians on all sides take note, but not holding my breath . . .

Thanks, Redsky. I appreciate the link. Anyone see this conference? GISS is now showing that June of 2016 is the hottest on record at 0.79 C above NASA’s baseline and about 1.01 C above 1880s. Working on the post for this now.

It doesn’t surprise me in the least. Whales and Dolphins may well have richer mental and emotional lives than humans. They may well also be better problem solvers if some of the recent research is correct.

Mulga Mumblebrain

Cetaceans have large brain, complex like ours. They have had them for millions of years longer than we have had ours. Yet the hominid chauvinists expect us to believe that they have used them for nothing much more than catching fish. And they live in an environment, the oceans, which we have no ability to comprehend as they do. And we are wiping them out, not vice versa. So who is the superior species, really?

Colorado Bob

Public Release: 18-Jul-2016
Flood damages in Germany could multiply under climate change

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)

Flood-related losses can be expected to increase considerably in Germany as a result of climate change, a new study shows. Extreme events like the severe floods along the river Elbe have already illustrated the potentially devastating consequences of certain weather conditions such as severe rainfall events, when continuing intense rain can no longer be absorbed by the soil and water levels in the rivers rise. Without appropriate adaptation, flood-related damage of currently about 500 million euros a year could multiply in the future, the comprehensive expert analysis published in the journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences highlights.

Europe’s in a rough spot between a lot of conflicting weather patterns. Hot, dry air moving up from the south, North Atlantic changes pulling more storms into Central and Northern Europe, and Arctic changes enforcing more persistent/long lasting patterns. Good report by Potsdam here.

– USA SW – Dams/infrastructure – History 1983 for anyone interested in the chronicle of Lake Powell’s Glen Canyon Dam when the pressure from upstream flooding stressed a concrete spillway to the point where it disintegrated and jeopardized the dam itself.

wili

The fastest rate that Hansen considered for doubling of sea level rise was five years. Doesn’t this kinda suggests that it could be even (slightly) shorter than that, if the same kinds of dynamics that accelerated GIS melt also might apply to Antarctica?

It’s kinda revolving around the big melt pulse year of 2012. If we’re going to have a five year doubling rate, we’ll need 1.5 to 2 2012s sometime between now and 2020. 2016 looks like a no-go for that. But the thing to read here is that there’s a tendency for these big melt pulse years to set up. And that’s problematic from a geophysical perspective. It means that there’s probably not this stable ramp. It means that melt tends to happen in big events. And that’s a bit risky and troublesome.

Jay M

Andy_in_SD

If you look at this location just south of Jakobshavn and then flip to previous years (no need to change the month/day) it becomes quite apparent.The surface ice melt carnage is very telling, and at much higher elevations / further inland.

Take note of the light blue melt patterns, as well as the size / location of melt ponds (lakes?).
In the previous years, you will see the melt patterns are not present in their current locations, and are much smaller.

Cate

Andy, coasting northward from your permalink, toggling from 17 to 18 July, it looks like the whole west coast of Greenland is in full-on melt mode now. There’s a big spew of greyish stuff coming out the mouth of Jakobshavn fjord, for one. Lots of ice motion, break-up, and outflow further up, right through Nares Strait. Yesterday I spotted a big transverse crack in the Petermann channel and another big chunk breaking loose in an Ellesmere fjord. It’s ice-moving season in the north.

– Robert, glad to see your:
“…Those numbers don’t include thermal expansion from the world’s warming oceans. Nor do they include an increasing amount of melt from Antarctica. Nor do they include large volumes of melt coming from the world’s rapidly disappearing mountain glaciers.”
– Must never lose sight of the aggregate.🙂

Spike

No Robert we’ve never needed it before. Last night was very uncomfortable – I went for a walk in the woods at 8pm and it was still 30C here in the centre of England. Pretty unusual for this neck of the woods.

Spike

Long Beach’s acting health officer, Dr. Mauro Torno, ordered the closure of all of the city’s coastal beaches after a massive sewage spill originating in downtown Los Angeles resulted in sewage flowing down the course of the Los Angeles River.

Long Beach officials announced the beach closures shortly after 5 p.m. Monday. The beaches are to remain off limits until Health Department officials can conduct laboratory tests that show local ocean waters are safe for people.

Colorado Bob

In 2014, Congress reauthorized the Harmful Algal Bloom and Hypoxia Research and Control Act, originally passed in 1998, to encourage more research. But the measure didn’t actually provide funding; it only signaled the need for it.

So money for algal bloom science comes from more general federal science funds, and those pots are shrinking. Congressionally approved funding for a broad range of related science is around $9 million this year, down 45 percent from five years ago, according to several scientists involved in the research. That means less money for deploying sensors or even to pay for boats and crews to monitor the shorelines.

“It’s a paradox,” said Christopher Gobler, a professor of marine sciences at Stony Brook University who provides the data for Mr. Korbel’s weekly report and believes the field should be more mainstream. “We need it more than ever, and we’ve brought ourselves to the precipice of making great forecasts, but we can’t make it happen.”

I really appreciate that he’s still going, despite the fact that going by what he wrote years ago it could very well already be too late. It must be depressing to be sounding an urgent alarm like that and seemingly have no one listen. He’s one of the first alarm-sounders that I started reading regularly.

He was a huge inspiration for the work I do here. He seems to have backed off from the catastrophic climate change research a bit. I can understand. It’s tough psychologically. But he’s still fighting hard for doing the right thing. I can really admire him for all that he’s done.

It’s just that Antarctica is scary vulnerable to melt from below. (As Bob and you note — it’s a greased griddle and those long inland below sea level slopes don’t help matters).

Add in a little sea level rise and the Greenland topography looks less sanguine in any case. And that bowl area in the Greenland center makes a catchment for surface melt that could form an overtopping sub glacial lake at some point or another.

Colorado Bob

Erik

Colorado Bob

Greg –
Thanks, I never get tried of looking at the MODIS images .
They have added the one from this morning to the gallery feature. I took another look at it closely, at the 250 meter resolution , every red dot in the upper half of image is burning tundra.
This is really a very scary image for what reveals , ………… the future.
It makes “The Anaktuvuk River fire, the biggest in North Slope history, burns across the tundra Sept. 10, 2007.” look like a marsh mellow roast
And the fact that so many fires are burning over so many rich methane deposits,

There’s a place in Iran, were a methane seep has been on fire for 2,500 years, it is thought the “burning bush” idea first came from this feature.

Colorado Bob

Greg

CB, thank you. If we could overlay a well known geographic outline on one of those MODIS images the size would really pop out, such as an outline of England, France, Texas, etc. I don’t have the software currently but if anyone else does, please do. It will show just how huge these areas are for most readers. I see it intellectually but not viscerally. (The possible burning bush origin is fascinating.)

Colorado Bob

Colorado Bob

One of the great disasters of our time is unfolding as I type. The other day Neven put up a great post about lighting moving North. Iced lightning.

It seems the sea ice used to tamp down the storms in the summer, and their ability in the Arctic to produce lighting over land.

That has changed .

I first saw this 9 years ago when The Anaktuvuk River fire
was started by lighting . It was the largest tundra fire in the last 5,000 years in that region.

But today the fires in Russia , make the Anaktuvuk River fire look like a marsh mellow roast . And they are burning over the richest gas deposits the Russians have. Think I’m crazy ? Go down to the 250 meter resolution , and look at this, this is a big deal.
Aqua/MODIS
2016/201
07/19/2016
07:50 UTCFires and smoke in central Russia

Another black irony really. These states are basically voting to ensure that climate crises, when they do come, hit them the hardest. Red states are getting pretty red hot due to all that climate change they’re ignoring. Not something I like to see. Can we please just mitigate this?

Abel Adamski

Colorado Bob

To all that read and post links to new info here; thank you. Thanks RS for putting this site up even though all the freaking news everyone posts is about the on-going collapse of our climate. Nothing good, eh folks?

Been reading, watching, and living with the radical changes in the world’s climate and oceans for over half of my life (almost 62 now) as a 50+ year surfer/40+ year snowboarder who has moved from living on different beaches to living in different mountain ranges for the second half of my life. What I realized is that the visible changes have been in my face because of where I have lived where people in cities…they just don’t notice. Bird and insect populations going down, forests dying around me of drought, seasons just completely mixed up. Oh my.

Like CB, I too never expected to see any of what I’ve been reading and seeing around me actually happen while I was still alive. Not at this level of…intensity.

Twenty years ago, thirty years, the authors of so many science articles seemed to be of a like mind in their warnings of ‘Look out next century’ when it would go off the rails. Seems like they all were a wee bit too optimistic, doesn’t it? Anybody else notice that in the last ten or so the question of ‘when’ has shifted from 2100 to 2070, to 2050, and now…well, the optimists seem to be getting a bit nervous.

In 2004 I read an article on CommonDreams that was published by the Observer/UK Feb. 22, 2004 that was titled: ‘Now the Pentagon Tells Bush: Climate Change Will Destroy US’ about a report that was buried by the Bush Administration. Now I’m not exactly a friend of the Pentagon but their best minds at the time were giving us a 20 year time limit before “Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life.” 2024. Were getting close to that date and there sure seems to be a lot of refugees flooding Europe and it isn’t all from war. Even the wars going on started with droughts and loss of food crops (Syria in particular did). Now there are more refugees worldwide than at the end of WWII. I read recently that estimates are in the 62 million range.

You folks are paying attention. Notice what the world is doing out your window? Yep, me, too.

At nearly the same time in 2004 a study came out of a UC Santa Cruz climatologist’s lab whose team came out with the connection between melting Arctic Ice and the creation of persistent high pressure domes off the West Coast that would cause the Jet Stream to re-direct north. Yeah, well…the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge been around for years now. El Nino shoved it away but it’s baaaaack.

I moved north that year from Mt. Shasta after having moved back to Cali ten years earlier from the Bear River Range of N. Utah (after a stint as a student at Utah State) and kept warning friends and family that what’s happening now to California was coming. I was poo-poo’d a lot and told to quit being such a pessimist. The ski resort there opened this last winter for the first time in three years…

Here in the Selkirk Range of NE Washington State north of Spokane the climate has literally gone off the rails. Impressively according to a retired biologist/teacher neighbor who has been keeping a calendar for nearly 50 years here. I’ve only been here 12 winters now and it has completely changed even in that short time on the calendars I keep. Giant vicious windstorms/lightning blasting monster t-storms, drought, fires, very little snowpack up above to the 4,000 foot and higher. And it has nearly quit snowing at my elevation (2,000+ ft.). What snow does fall doesn’t stay because temps in the 40 & 50F range show up at the start of February. This last winter was better. Sort of. With the calendar in front of me I see rain, 55’F days, 20’F sunny, pouring rain on the local ski hill (49’N), and Feb. 27-29 it was in the 60s.

Almost the entire month of March was in the 50s at my elevation. On the 28th we got 15″ of snow on my hill while it rained down here. On the 29th it was 72’F and 74’F on the 30th & 31st. By the first week of April, the last week of the ski season, it was in the 80s. The hill was 75’F on top of the peak…in April! I was snowboarding in a tank top. Unheard of this close to Canada’s border.

We went over 100’F in June. No ‘last June frost’ anymore, either.

I watched giant lightning bolts slam down in Colville last Friday along with 1/2 inch hail and a deluge of rain so large there were waves washing across the streets.

So to all of you, again thanks for being out there, for being intelligent and aware of all this, for talking out loud. There are times when it gets pretty hard being surrounded by incredible ignorant people who absolutely refuse to read the science. Seems like only my neighbor and I are paying attention here.